City-building games got complicated really fast after SimCity 2000 released nearly 20 years ago. They remain a joy to play, but the best ones tend to come with steep learning curves.

Not so for the Virtual City series, however, as it adopts a more casual tilt on the genre. Virtual City 2: Paradise Resort offers a compact city-building experience and a lengthy scenario-based campaign to dig your mouse into. Whether you’re waiting for the new SimCity to drop on OS X or looking for an alternative city builder with a different approach, it’s worth a closer look.(more…)

I’m a brand-new Mac user, so to speak, as my MacBook Pro found its home barely 2 years ago. I’ve quickly grown quite an addiction to Mac apps. In the real world, I’m a born and raised in Brazil copywriter for an advertisement agency, so I’m always surrounded by creative people.

So, here’s the apps I use to get my work done on the Mac in my day-to-day work. Remember, this is not a magical workflow: my belief is that productivity comes from the person, not from the apps they use to achieve it. These applications help with my workflow, and I hope they can help you out to reach your goals as they do mine.

Two years ago, we had the chance to talk with the CatPig Studios team about Radium. They led us behind the scenes at the inspiration behind their popular menubar radio app for the Mac, and why they develop for the Mac in particular.

The world's changed a lot in the meantime, with seemingly countless music streaming services competing to be the only way you listen to music. And yet, the Radium team has pushed on, releasing a brand-new version of Radium this year that's nicer than ever.

We got the chance to interview Kirill Zorin from CatPig Studios again this week, so here's the latest info about their work, and how they're competing in 2013's online music landscape.

Back in the summer of 2012, Slender: The Eight Pages was released on the PC and Mac, and in a short amount of time, this free, short and experimental horror game became an instant hit. With big franchises like Resident Evil and Dead Space going heavy on action rather than horror, Slender revitalized the horror genre by taking things back to basics; the simple task of walking through a creepy forest trying to find clues while being chased by an ominous figure was, and still very much is, a frightening experience.

Fast forwarding to more recent weeks, Slender’s new iteration, Slender: The Arrival, comes packed with everything that made the original so spooky while adding in a handful of new things. Unfortunately, these new things add deadweight to an otherwise impeccable experimental gaming experience.

If you’re like me and are completely in love with your Doxie scanner, then you’ll no doubt be scanning almost anything you can get your hands on, whether it needs scanning or not! It’s a great first step towards de-cluttering your desk and making everything as easy to find as possible. And even if you don’t have a Doxie, there’s a ton of other great scanners out there that can quickly turn all of your paper into digital documents.

But once you’ve scanned all your paperwork, what do you actually do with it? That’s where iDocument comes in. Could it be the app your paperless workflow needs?

It’s happened to all of us: you download a new app, and are all excited over its features … only to find that it really doesn’t work for you. So it lingers in Launchpad, and in all likelihood is never opened again. That is, until you one day open it by chance, and try it again. Perhaps it got an update, perhaps you were just bored, or perhaps you kept hearing people praise it and figured you missed something the first time around.

And boom, you’ve got a new favorite app. That app that didn’t work for you the first time suddenly fits like a glove. It’s perfect for you, and you wonder why you didn’t see the light sooner.

That happened to me with Alfred. I downloaded it, couldn’t get what the fuss was all about, and went back to Spotlight. Then, I tried it again a couple months later, and thought it was nice enough, so I got the powerpack. Soon, I couldn’t imagine working with Alfred, and I’m even more addicted to the awesomeness that is Alfred 2 and its workflows.

It also happened to me with PopClip, as I’ve written about before. With it, the update that added actions flew under my radar at first, but once I tried it out, I was hooked.

So, what apps grew on you over time? We’d love to hear your stories below!

About a year and a half ago Apple revealed iCloud — its cross device syncing solution. With iCloud we were supposed to be able to easily sync and edit documents on all of our devices. While iCloud has lived up to this promise in many regards, iCloud document syncing is different from other syncing solutions in that it does away with the traditional file / folder paradigm and stores documents “in the app.” While this approach works well most of the time, other times, it is nice to manage documents and folders outside of iCloud’s in app interface.

That is where Cloud Mate comes in. It’s well known that you can manage iCloud documents from the Mobile Documents folder hidden away in the Library folder, and there are also free options like Plain Cloud that clean up the messy file names you find in the Mobile Documents folder. So what does Cloud Mate add that theses other solutions don’t have? Read on to find out and see if Cloud Mate can solve your iCloud document management needs.

It used to seem nearly impossible to fill up your hard drive, and a new computer used to always give you more storage space than your old one. That’s increasingly not the case, with SSDs coming standard on MacBooks. If you’re struggling to get the most out of your 64 or 128Gb of storage space, then CleanMyMac 2, our sponsor this week, might be the app you need.

CleanMyMac 2 is the latest version of the well known app for cleaning your Mac, and it brings a number of new features and a brand-new UI to the table. It’ll help you find old, large files on your Mac — perhaps an old Office installer you had in your Documents folder, or old video chunks you should move to an external drive — and also let you delete anything that old apps left behind when you uninstalled them. It’ll also surface apps you haven’t used in a long time, clean up your iPhoto library, and more, to help you get the most out of your storage space.

After all, there’s no reason to have to skimp on what you keep on your Mac when there’s old files there that could just be deleted or moved out. Check out their feature video for more info:

We found the latest version to be an impressive upgrade in our review of CleanMyMac 2. If you’ve got a lot of old files sitting around on your Mac, you’ll be sure to be just as impressed.

Go Get it!

Ready to get your Mac clean and free up space on your SSD? Then you should download the free trial of CleanMyMac 2 and give it a shot. You can then get the full version for $39.95 to keep your Mac fresh and clean.

Then, the best thing about CleanMyMac 2 is that it’s a free update to CleanMyMac 1, so if you already have an older version of CleanMyMac, you can get the latest features for free. If you haven’t updated yet, the updated version just might be the nicest app you didn’t even know you had.

The Humble Bundle is a great way to pick up a few indie games for not a lot of cash while directly supporting developer’s and charity, too. It also serves to bring indie games to a wider audience, introducing players to titles they otherwise would have never discovered.

That’s how I came to be in possession of Thirty Flights of Loving, the first-person interactive story video game from Blendo Games. Initially released as a Kickstarter incentive, Thirty Flights of Loving has since been made available for download on its own and has received heaps of praise as an impressive evolution in video game storytelling. (more…)